La retraduction des Liaisons dangereuses en roumain : traduction sémantique ou traduction communicative ?

Abstract

The Re-translation of the Dangerous Liaisons into Romanian: a semantic or a communicative translation?

Choderlos de Laclos’s only novel, written in 1782, which made him famous due to the series of letters exchanged between the characters, claims to fight libertinage while also embodying it through the fascinating figures of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. The elegance of the author's style, the finesse of the analysis of the characters' contradictory behaviors and feelings aroused the interest of some translators, all having a writer’s and essayist’s background, who strove to render it into Romanian. Our analysis is based on the assumption that the choices of the translators reveal different skopos1. Based on observations at the micro and macrotextual level, we note that the two oldest, those of RaduCioculescu (1943) and AlexandruPhilippide (1966), focused on a linguistic translation, favoring the source text and keeping, as far as possible, close to the syntactic and semantic structures of the French language. Their fidelity to the author’s style is obvious. We will show that their loyalty to the author and his style sets them apart from the more recent version of Cristina Jinga (2011). She favors a communicative translation, which aims at getting an effect on the Romanian reader similar to the impact of the original on the French reader. Without betraying Laclos either stylistically or in his essence, the first two translators aimed to make Laclos known to Romanian readers, while the last one has rather considered a rejuvenation of the novel, taking into consideration the dynamics and the evolution of the Romanian language, the changes in the cultural context (20th century/ vs./ 21st century translation) and the taste of the modern readers.